Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up and discover the incredible feats, sights, sounds and smells of the circus with Kit Neale. “We went to the circus in Peckham Rye for my birthday back in September and it brought back so many childhood memories,” Kit Neale begins before being engulfed by the first of many waves of well-wishers as the fanfare of his London Collections: Men catwalk debut buzzed backstage. Having previously taken us on familiar British excursions to the likes of Margate, pubs and Elephant & Castle, the prince of print transported us inside, via Peckham, the tent of his imagination. Shaking off the weight of expectation of his debut and recent NEWGEN Men award, Neale emerged as a potential ringmaster of London’s emerging menswear design talent.
“We were in a tent surrounded by Cuban acrobats who whizzed and fizzed overhead, a Mongolian contortionist girl who squeezed herself into a bottle and all sorts of craziness. They were in Peckham for a few nights but they travel all over the country and beyond, who knows where they were going to next,” he ponders. As he prodded and probed British culture, his tongue might have remained firmly in his cheek but this collection marked a moment of maturity. Whilst drawn to the circus personalities he met and imagined, Neale developed the Mohair ‘teddy bear’ fur he introduced for his recent Rainbow Brite collection and experimented with the iconic typography and graphics of posters and applied the Barney Bubbles and Job Wouters inspired shapes and lettering throughout his workwear shapes, delicate Fred G. Johnson-esque embroidery and Andrew Logan borrowed jewellery. With a graphic T-shirt finale, Neale simply and succinctly spelled out his message, “Thank you LCM.”
